


Nothing but Immortality

by Andsoshewrites



Category: Dead Poets Society (1989)
Genre: (most of the time), Anderperry April, Blood, Gen, M/M, POV Outsider, Period-Typical Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-05-30
Packaged: 2020-03-30 21:28:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19035931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Andsoshewrites/pseuds/Andsoshewrites
Summary: It's not that Neil and Todd are obvious, per say--they cannot afford to be--, merely that their friends are rather observant and know a thing or two about subtext.(a very late entry for Anderperry April 2019)





	1. Charlie

**Author's Note:**

> This is for day 10 of Anderperry April: "Co. Finding Out About Anderperry." Sorry to be so late about it but April caught me right at the end of the semester and oh boy was I busy.
> 
> What inspired this particular fic (aside from the prompt, lol) was that I tend to write Anderperry's friends as having absolute best case scenario reactions to their relationship, which I know isn't exactly realistic. None of the Dead Poets react violently to the Anderperry relationship here--don't worry--, but they also aren't immediately and/or outspokenly supportive of it either. So, this fic is a bit of a more realistic try at positioning Anderperry in the world ;P. Enjoy!

**i.**

a.

Charlie Dalton knows a thing or two about his best friend, Neil Perry. He knows, for one, about the time some long-transferred-away boy pressed Neil against the wall when they were 14, and Neil, as he was recounting the story, absently tapped at his lips and said softly, into the dim, quiet space of their dorm far after curfew, “I think I liked it….”

And it wasn’t the fact that he had liked it that caught Charlie’s attention—it was the fact that he had said it, the press of his fingertips against his lips.

b.

It isn’t until Neil, blood dripping down his nose, shambles into Charlie’s room and shoos Pitts out of his own bed with a tone of uncharacteristic vitriol that Charlie really starts to get it, though.

“I didn’t even touch him,” Neil says, looking shocked and staring down at the smears of blood across his fingers. The moonlight through the window casts the single drop of blood that drips to the floor in a dark gray hue, juxtaposed into sight by the white of the tile it falls across and onto.

Neil brings his arm up to roughly smash it against his nose, smearing the same tone of dark gray masking bright red across the pale of his face. _Werewolf_ , Charlie thinks in his father’s voice, but he has no words to say.

“Sorry,” Neil says suddenly, getting up off of Pitts’s bed. “Sorry, forget what I said.”

He gets up to leave, but Charlie stops him. In a small, scratchy voice, he says, “It’s okay, Neil.” Neil turns back to look at him. “It’s okay.”

Neil smiles, wide and self-deprecating. _Werewolf_ , Charlie thinks in his father’s voice, but he has no words to say. “It’s not,” Neil says and leaves.

“What was that about?” Pitts asks when he creeps back into their room.

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it,” Charlie says.

c.

Charlie’s knowledge about Neil isn’t actually all that relevant until a few years later, however.

“So,” Charlie says, a bit conspiratorially, “the new roommate.” A wide, teasing grin graces his lips as he waits for Neil to respond.

They’re sitting on two parallel chairs tucked into a corner of the study lounge. Meeks and Pitts are talking about their plan to build a radio, Cameron is actually doing work, and Todd is off in another corner looking pretty miserable while leafing through a chemistry textbook.

“And what about him?” Neil asks, writing down another equation to solve. _Nerd_ , Charlie thinks.

“He’s pretty cute, right?”

Neil snorts loud enough for Hager to shush them. Then, in a whisper, he tells Charlie, “I’m not talking about this with you.”

But the appreciative smile on his lips says more than enough.

d.

“Ah, fuck,” Cameron says suddenly, pushing himself away from his desk a month or so after Charlie noticed that Neil’s goo-goo eyes for Todd were very much reciprocated. “I know _you_ don’t care, Dalton, but in case Hager drops by, tell him I forgot my book in the lounge and went to go get it.”

“I’ll get it!” Charlie says immediately, pushing himself onto his feet. Cameron narrows his eyes at him.

“Why?”

“I…just feel a little restless. Wanna get my legs pumping, you know? And I think I forgot one of my books too! It’s just easier all around, right, Cameron?”

“I don’t believe you for a second, Dalton, and now, I’m real sure you’re hiding something.”

The problem is that, as far as Charlie knows, Neil and Todd are still down there. He had snuck out with them after Hager had checked all their beds, more as a kind of shield than anything else, and slipped back into his and Cameron’s room about ten minutes later.

“Cameron, just let me go and get your stupid book. I’m doing you a favor.”

They hold eye contact for a few seconds, Cameron all the while tapping his fingers against the back of his chair. Charlie can practically _see_ him connecting dots, piecing things together.

“It’s a calc book,” Cameron says finally, slowly, with a glare. “It has my name on the inside cover.” Then, he turns back around and goes back to typing his essay.

Charlie isn’t particularly sure what to expect when he gets to the lounge, and he walks down the hallways a bit nervous, reluctant to intrude on Neil and Todd’s time together but knowing he has no choice. At the door, he stops.

It’s dark inside the room, and if anyone else were to barge in, they wouldn’t know to look for the small patch of lamp light half-hidden by the couches in the center of the room. But Charlie does, and he leans to the left and the right to try to catch a glimpse of his friends, finally spotting them at two chairs near the wall, Todd’s head laid across Neil’s shoulder. The sight of them like that floats in an unusual, unpinnable space in Charlie’s consciousness. They don’t look like ‘normal’ boys, per say, together like that, but they don’t look like the grinning phantom homosexuals from the PSAs either. They look…romantic. Lovely, somehow.

Charlie sheepishly knocks on the door and doesn’t look when he knows Todd and Neil jump apart.

Neil walks over and opens the door. “Charlie?” he asks.

“Cameron was gonna come over,” Charlie says, stalking past Neil, trying to make this whole interaction as unawkward as possible, “I just need to get his book is all. I’ll leave you two alone, promise.” He spots the book almost immediately, plainly out on a table. He briefly flicks the cover up to check for Cameron’s name then picks it up. “Maybe you two should get going soon too, though.”

“Thanks, Charlie,” Neil says softly as Charlie starts to walk out the door. He turns to look back at them.

“No problem, guys.”

Cameron notices that Charlie doesn’t actually bring back any book of his own, but he doesn’t say anything about it.


	2. Meeks and Pitts

**ii.**

Steven Meeks doesn’t know the most about Neil Perry. He knows he’s got a complete hardass for a dad, he knows he likes acting, he knows he’s incredibly personable, and he knows he takes on way too much for one 16-year-old boy. They were roommates one year, and Neil was nice enough, but he was usually off with Charlie, and whenever Steven saw them together without the rest of the guys, they were usually discussing something that seemed deadly serious, Neil a good portion of the time looking pretty distressed.

Steven Meeks knows even less about Todd Anderson, but he does know that he and Neil were basically joined at the hip from the moment they met. Neil smiles more, takes more risks, laughs more. Todd speaks up, tells a joke that all of the Dead Poets can hear, sends everyone into stitches on the floor of the cave. Neil is the first to revive, grinning bright and slapping Todd on the back.

It’s never struck him as much other than quite the powerful friendship—until today.

He and Pitts are sitting out on the roof together. It’s a comfortable, not unpleasantly chilly Saturday, and they’re testing out this idea Pitts had to get their radio to pick up the channels better, poking and prodding at things with screwdrivers, yanking and tugging at metal parts. Meeks is sitting sort of angled on the roof, mostly facing the entrance back inside but partly facing the lake. Pitts is fully facing the door.

Two figures had crossed the grass and made their way over to the dock earlier, so mundane in Meeks’s peripheral vision that he had forgotten he had seen them until he had turned his neck to the side to crack it and seen Todd and Neil sitting there together, pointedly facing Welton rather than the water. Neil is holding one of Todd’s hands in both of his own, resting all of them on his thigh.

 _They can’t see us_ , Meeks realizes with a growing sense of unaccountable horror, _the way that the roof is angled…_

The hands rise up into the air between them, drawing towards Neil, Meeks can’t stop watching, can’t look away, doesn’t fully know what he’s waiting for.

“So, I think, if we do that, then the antenna will be…hey, Meeks, are you listening to me?”

Meeks has no words to say.

No way to stop Pitts from following the line of his eyes and peering over the side of the roof as well, no way to explain Neil and Todd’s gap in perception, the movement of intertwined hands up from thigh to…to…

There’s a faint movement of Todd’s lips, Meeks thinks, and then what Meeks thinks is a frown across Neil’s. Neil does an exaggerated show of looking all around, and Todd laughs. Their hands part, and Meeks’s breath starts to rush back to him; Pitts opens his mouth to speak, probably to scold Meeks for not paying attention to him, and then.

Todd smooths Neil’s hair back with a soft smile, and Neil smiles with the warmth and content of a cat in sunlight after days and days of rain.

“The radio,” Pitts says weakly.

“The radio,” Meeks responds.

They tear their eyes away.


	3. Knox

**iii.**

Knox is too ashamed to ask for help, but he knows he needs it as he walks bloody-faced through the dark in the direction he _thinks_ Welton is in. It’s more than the blood and bruises: it’s the explanation behind them that he’s ashamed of, and that’s why he’s fully committed to slipping back into Welton unnoticed, washing his face off in a sink in the bathroom, and scuttling into his and Hopkins’s room as quietly as possible.

What he doesn’t expect is to hear a voice and the trail of a sentence break out from the library before another voice shushes the first. Knox stops, stares at the door. It’s really none of his business, he knows: he and the Dead Poets sneak out all the time. In fact, he was missing a meeting by going to Chris’s party. He checks his watch—it’s past the time that their meetings tend to wrap up. _Did they move into the library, then? Why would they do that? …Or is it even some of the guys at all in there?_

Knox is caught between nosiness and the throbbing in his face. He decides to press the lesser-injured side of his face against the door, listening closely for any murmurs, anything he could make out.

There’s a rhythm, Knox realizes, mirroring the throbbing around his cheek, eye, and mouth. Da-DAH, da-DAH, da-DAH, da-DAH, da-DAH. He recognizes the meter, Keating has probably told them the name of it, but for the life of him, Knox just can’t remember it.

_Maybe just peek inside. It’s poetry anyway, it’s probably one of the guys._

Knox does. And he doesn’t know why he opens the door as gingerly as if he’s cradling a secret, but he realizes he finds one anyway.

The poetry is coming from a little out of the way of the main entrance of the library, and as such, Knox shuts the door behind him just as softly as he’d opened it and creeps off towards the source of the sound. He stops several feet away from a scene that makes him forget all about the sorry state of his face.

Barely illuminated by the dim, clunky flashlights they use out in the cave, Todd and Neil are sitting profoundly close together, the scant space between them becoming the highlighted feature of the scene as Todd loosely holds the flashlight while Neil reads a poem, book in one hand and the other reaching out to caress Todd’s cheek. He has a glove on the hand holding the book, a remnant of their time out in the cave with the rest of the Dead Poets, but the hand stroking Todd’s cheek is bare.

               “We can die by it, if not live by love,  
               And if unfit for tombs and hearse  
               Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;  
               And if no piece of chronicle we prove,  
               We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;  
               As well a well-wrought urn becomes  
               The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,  
               And by these hymns, all shall approve  
               Us canonized for love.”

Neil whispers the lines as if he’s been practicing this poem, with so much emotion and weight in every word that Knox feels like he needs to leave. His brain hasn’t quite caught up to the situation yet, but he feels uncomfortable, seeing his two friends so raw, their eyes fixed on each other’s, pinning the other’s stare in place with the weight of feelings totally unutterable, verbally inexpressible.

But by god, are they _trying_.

Knox backs up, completely spatially disoriented by this display, and kicks the leg of a chair with the back of his heel. Neil trails off, “You, to whom love was peace, that now is…” And Neil and Todd snap their heads up and _stare_.

They have the eyes of deer under the stony stares of human intruders, Neil’s irises and pupils spilling together into a darkness matching the very air of the night, the blueness of Todd’s eyes faint—an unrecognizable patch of murky pallor in the dim light. Knox almost thinks he’s more afraid than they are, wanting nothing more than to turn and run.

The stalemate established, Neil and Todd slowly begin to part from each other, and Neil asks with a creaky voice, “Knox?” Todd points the flashlight over at him, and sounding startled, Neil asks, “What happened to your face?”

Knox knows that his face has become their opportunity to steamroll over all of this, to make it out to be some odd dream of Knox’s, some misinterpretation, some delusion, some trick of the night.

 _I get it_ , the part of him healing over bruises and drying blood wants to say, the part of him that’s been chasing after an unattainable girl, _I don’t really know why, and I don’t think I understand, but I_ get _it_.

 _Neil and Todd?_ the part of him unblemished chimes in, the part of him that has been built into pride by his wealthy background, by his prestigious private school upbringing and ability to manage himself in high society, _My friends? How could they be homosexuals? How could_ they _do this?_ Disgust, a misty fog circling around in his brain, but he has no words to say.

“Chet kinda beat me senseless for making a move on Chris. I was just going to bed.”

He doesn’t quite run out of the room, but it’s a near thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> poem is "The Canonization" by John Donne xoxo


	4. Keating

**iv.**

There are two short knocks at Todd’s office door, musical and light in speed and force. “Come in,” Todd calls, sliding a bookmark into his copy of Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil.” Subconsciously, Todd recognizes that this isn’t a familiar visitor. His colleagues’ knocks are typically firm and even, all business, no music; his students’ knocks are typically fainter, sometimes a little sheepish, a soft knock followed by a firmer one. Also no music.

With a soft-sharp note of alarm as the door starts to open, Todd realizes that he should really gather up his notes and store them away somewhere, and he starts to before he realizes who’s standing in the doorway.

“Hello, Dr. Anderson,” John Keating himself says with that same twinkling smile he’d had when Todd was just a teenager and so, so scared—of the world, of Keating, of himself. Todd stares at him for a moment, speechless.

“Mr. Keating?” Todd finally asks, slowly rising up from his chair.

“Oh, none of that, sit down, Todd, sit down.” Keating makes his way over to the chair perpetually facing Todd’s desk—usually where his students sit during office hours. “I’m not overstepping any boundaries by calling you Todd, now, am I?”

“No, sir,” Todd says softly. He stares at the papers under his fingertips, wonders whether he should continue in the motions of putting them away.

Keating catches the mildly nervous tapping of his fingertips. “What are you working on?” he asks.

“It’s um…” _You’re not a kid anymore, Todd. You’re an expert in this field. You love this. You_ know _this_. “I’m not sure yet,” he says, getting some of his voice back, “I’m taking notes about the villagers’ responses to the minister in ‘The Minister’s Black Veil’—I don’t know if you’ve ever read…?”

“Oh, I have indeed. The Gothic is quite the interesting genre, isn’t it? Matthew Lewis’s _The Monk_ is quite the work as well, right?”

“Oh, yes. I’ve also read that.” Here they are, Todd realizes, speaking in queer literary tongues. The corner of Todd’s lips twitch up into a smile.

“Yes, well, I would assume so! I hear you’re quite the learned man! In fact, that’s precisely how I learned where to find you. Your name was in one of the literary magazines I subscribe to. A book-length analysis of American identity in our very own Uncle Walt’s _Leaves of Grass_! How proud I am, Todd! I merely had to have it. I read it the whole plane ride here, and I simply loved it. I _must_ talk to you more about it later, there are so many things I want to ask you!” Todd’s 17-year-old self preens, and he grins wide.

They agree to discuss it over lunch the next day, and Keating makes a comment about having to go meet the rest of the English department as well. At the door, though, he stops.

“How have you been, Todd?” he asks after a pause.

“I’ve been well—honestly, I have. I’m okay now.”

“That’s good. I was so worried about you when I left, but I knew there wasn’t a thing I could do.” Keating pauses. “Did you know I actually broke up with my fiancée for a while when I first went back to London?”

“No, not at all.”

“Yes, well…I had some bad months. She’s my wife now, but for a year or so…I _did_ love someone else.”

“Oh?” Todd says, a slight tone of teasing in his voice. He appreciates this—Keating going out of his way to push this information about himself out first. Ever since Todd started studying Whitman more seriously, he had always suspected.

“He was quite a nice man.” Keating says simply, looking a bit nervous—Todd’s never seen him that way before.

“Thank you, Mr. Keating,” Todd says, and they both know what for. “I suppose you knew about me and Neil then?”

“I certainly suspected.” Keating winks at him, and Todd laughs about the whole situation for the first time…ever, probably. “And after that…did you…meet anyone new?”

“A few times,” Todd says, “but no one has ever…stuck with me quite like Neil, if that makes sense.”

“I’m sorry, Todd,” Keating says.

“Don’t be.” Todd smiles, looks wistfully out at a point of space beyond Keating. “‘I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!/That the exquisite scheme is for it, and the nebulous float is for it, and the cohering is for it,/And all preparation is for it..and identity is for it..and life and death are for it’—I believe some old friend of ours told us that.”

“Yes,” Keating says, smiling, “I believe so too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> poem is (an extremely tiny part of) "Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman xoxo


End file.
